Three Lessons For HR Practitioners

by Terry Hannigan, Associate

During the past several years, SAG has undertaken a variety of HR challenges for Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Centers across the country.  This has included HR organizational assessment and redesign and preparation for outside reviews as well as post-review analysis and recommendations.  Some of the reviews were conducted by a single consultant while others required a team of experienced practitioners.

I’ve learned a variety of lessons, but I want to focus on three:

First, act quickly when you find a significant problem. In one case, hospital leadership knew that they had a serious issue on their hands as soon as they uncovered a potential problem—and, although they did not know the extent of that problem, they correctly assumed that the situation was not going to improve with time.  Some managers might have swept the issue under the rug, but the facility’s leadership recognized the importance of protecting the integrity of their organization.  The longer they allowed the problem to go on, the more difficult it was going to be to find an acceptable solution. 

Second, there is no substitute for experience.  Here again hospital leadership is critical: it is essential to recognize that some problems call for the involvement of others who are more expert than they. It’s like calling a plumber: if you leave a leak untouched, water will eventually start gushing out until the break is fixed.  Better to get a professional to solve the problem immediately than to ineffectively fix it yourself, and watch as the floor, your furniture and other items are irretrievably ruined.

And third, while HR experience is critically important, it’s vital for a consultant to also have a senior leadership perspective in mind when making recommendations to clients.  It’s easy to get caught up in HR’s rules and regulations, and to see things in the black-and-white world of do’s and don’ts those regulations create.   However, it’s also important to evaluate your proposed actions in ways leadership would: how will they affect the organization’s productivity, morale, and ability to accomplish its mission.  Before recommending an action, we look at the big picture from management’s viewpoint, which, I believe, makes our eventual recommendations more useful and more effective for our client.

SAG can provide a variety of HR advice and services, including:

·      enabling your organization to assess its current situation;

·      evaluating policies, procedures and processes;

·      reviewing HR operations from an overall picture to focused reviews in specific areas including assessing whether HR is prepared for outside reviews (especially the VA Oversight and Effectiveness review process) and assisting in responding to the results of those outside reviews;

·      mentoring new HR Chiefs and functional area supervisors;

·      conducting HR Record reviews (both eOPF and hard copy) focusing on topics such as pay, recruitment, awards, employee and labor relations, and

·      looking at healthcare professional credentialing. 

Our consultants include highly experienced leaders; HR Managers; and functional experts from both field and headquarters backgrounds.  Our expertise runs the gamut of every HR function as well as oversight of the function from an executive perspective.

Human Resources is a complex system both from the HR practitioner’s approach and, more importantly, from the Executive perspective.  Competent strategic HR advice is essential to efficient and effective leadership of any organization.  Failures in HR can lead to a variety of adverse consequences.  So if you’ve got an HR problem you’d like to have looked at, don’t wait for it to get worse.  Take action as quickly as possible.